I've admired Nick's work for a long time, so this class was a great inspiration to finally finish a Skillshare project. For my postcard, I wanted to work off of one of my favorite buildings in Chicago - the Carbide and Carbon building. I really enjoy the contrast between the building's fine detailing and the blocky, geometric forms.

After spending some time with the Art Deco style of lettering, I sketched out four different possible layouts for my postcard. I used Procreate for all my sketching, which helped me keep my lines straight without thinking too much about it.

I decided to move forward with the fourth sketch, as it was the biggest stretch from my normal style. I'd like to go back and do a version based on the second sketch as well. In any case, I began working on a more detailed version of my selected layout.

Then I brought the sketch into Illustrator and began vectorizing. At this point, the layout began to shift away from the initial sketch as I discovered what was working and what wasn't. One of the things I struggled with the most was how empty the brick section of the card looked initially, but I tried to avoid adding extra elements.

I didn't try as many color palettes as Nick did, as I knew I wanted to echo the green and gold of the inspiration building. If I were to have the postcard printed, I'd love to play with accents of gold foil on the lettering, but for the screen I tried to find a nice compromise that had enough contrast without being overly saturated.

I still need to add grain texture and finalize the back of my card, but I'd love any feedback that anyone has on the progress thus far!

In the future, I'd like to try lettering a word/place that has more opportunities for interesting ligatures.

 

UPDATE:

After spending some time away from the card, I decided that the gold band was just too much for the card and took away from the thin linework. I reworked that part before adding some grain for texture and I'm overall much happier with the card.